June 5, 2013 was when the world heard from Snowden. This year, it's your turn to speak out.

On June 5, 2013 the Guardian newspaper published the first of Edward Snowden's astounding revelations. The secret court order that conclusively showed that the US government was collecting the phone records of millions of innocent Verizon customers. It was the first of a continuous stream of stories that pointed out what we’ve suspected for a long time: that the world’s digital communications are being continuously spied upon by nation states with precious little oversight.

Twenty-three governments have come together this week for the 4th annual Freedom Online Coalition (FOC) conference in Tallinn, Estonia—a meeting where FOC members work together to "coordinate their diplomatic efforts and engage with civil society" in order to advance Internet freedom worldwide.

EFF filed a request to submit an amicus brief today in the Federal District Court of the Northern District of California, urging the Court to let a case entitled Doe v. Cisco Systems go forward against Cisco for its role in contributing to human rights abuses against the Falun Gong religious minority in China. China's record of human rights abuses against the Falun Gong is notorious, including detention, torture, forced conversions, and even deaths. These violations have been well-documented by the U.N., the U.S. State Department, and many others around the world, including documentation of China's use of sophisticated surveillance technologies to facilitate this repression.

Rumors of the extent of Ethiopia’s digital surveillance and censorship state have echoed around the information security community for years. Journalists such as Eskinder Nega have spoken of being shown text messages, printouts of emails, and recordings of their own telephone conversations by the Ethiopian security services. From within the country, commentators connected growing telecommunications surveillance to the increasing presence of Chinese telecommunications company ZTE. Externally, analysis of the targeted surveillance of exiled Ethiopians have turned up surveillance software built and sold by Western companies, such as FinFisher and Hacking Team.

The NSA has seen the future of mass surveillance, and it appears they believe that the future lies in malware. Earlier this week, The Intercept reported on a series of slides and memos leaked by Edward Snowden describing the NSA's "more aggressive" approach to signals intelligence, which circumvents encryption such as web browsing via HTTPS and email using PGP, by installing spyware directly onto targets' computers.